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HG Wells - War of the Worlds

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The War of the Worlds
by Herbert George Wells [1898]

But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be
inhabited? . . . Are we or they Lords of the
World? . . . And how are all things made for man?
KEPLER (quoted in The Anatomy of Melancholy)

BOOK ONE
THE COMING OF THE MARTIANS

CHAPTER ONE
THE EVE OF THE WAR

No one would have believed in the last years of the
nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly
and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as
mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their
various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps
almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise
the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a
drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and
fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their
assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the
infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave
a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human
danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life
upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall
some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most
terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars,
perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary
enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that
are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish,
intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this
earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their
plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came
the great disillusionment.

The planet Mars, I scarcely need remind the reader, revolves
about the sun at a mean distance of 140,000,000 miles,
and the light and heat it receives from the sun is barely half
of that received by this world. It must be, if the nebular
hypothesis has any truth, older than our world; and long
before this earth ceased to be molten, life upon its surface
must have begun its course. The fact that it is scarcely
one seventh of the volume of the earth must have accelerated
its cooling to the temperature at which life could begin. It
has air and water and all that is necessary for the support of
animated existence.

Yet so vain is man, and so blinded by his vanity, that no
writer, up to the very end of the nineteenth century, expressed
any idea that intelligent life might have developed
there far, or indeed at all, beyond its earthly level. Nor was
it generally understood that since Mars is older than our earth,
with scarcely a quarter of the superficial area and remoter
from the sun, it necessarily follows that it is not only more
distant from time's beginning but nearer its end.